Lorgat warns against Twenty20 overkill

LONDON (Reuters) - New international cricket chief Haroon Lorgat said on Wednesday it was important that the expanding Twenty20 format did not begin to dominate the Test and 50-over game.

South African Lorgat, who will become the International Cricket Council's (ICC) chief executive in July, said test cricket must remain the leading format in the sport.

"I sat in on the ICC cricket committee meeting this month and they were very clear that Test cricket should remain the pinnacle of the game and I agree," Lorgat told Reuters in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

Twenty20, which began in England in 2003, is making rapid progress as the game's most popular format and since the inaugural ICC Twenty20 World Cup in September, a slew of Twenty20 events have surfaced.

The unofficial Indian Cricket League began, the officially-backed Indian Premier League started last month and there is talk of England, West Indies and Pakistan expanding their own domestic Twenty20 competitions to exploit the wave of international popularity in the event.

"It's a form of the game we can use as a wonderful opportunity to grow cricket globally, though we will have to manage the load that Twenty20 takes on against Test and 50-over cricket," Lorgat said.

SENSIBLE BALANCE

"We are seeing a lot of Twenty20 now because the IPL is going on but like most things that are new, you see an explosion of interest at first and then things settle down.

"We might be having too much of it at first but I hope going forward we can keep a sensible balance between Twenty20 and the other formats."

Lorgat, 48 this month, is an accountant by profession though he has received an advanced cricketing pedigree with various roles within South African cricket, including convenor of selectors for the national team between 2004 and 2007 and treasurer of the cricket board.

He will travel to Dubai next month to try to secure accommodation in the city that will be his new home for at least the next three years.

Lorgat joins the ICC at a time when its image has taken something of a battering following the premature exit of his predecessor Malcolm Speed, its handling of controversies surrounding umpires Darrell Hair and Steve Bucknor and criticism it received after the farcical World Cup final last year.

Former ICC President Ehsan Mani told Reuters last month that the ICC "needs to pull its act together" or lose credibility.

"I would always prefer to see the game itself receive the maximum exposure in the news rather than the off the field issues that we have read about," Lorgat said. "They are not the kind of stories you want reported about the ICC.

"But with me soon to start and with David Morgan beginning his term as president at the same time, I hope we will be given the opportunity to project the game itself into the newspapers and improve the current image."